I’m the de facto IT guy at a small business in southern Louisiana. Following the better late than never school of thought, we’re doing offsite storage stuff, now.

The way I figured I’d go about this was getting a ton of hosted space and setting up FTP users.

I’ve got an application running on our 2003 server that uses FTP to maintain a mirror of itself on a remote location, and I’d planned on having a separate user with write priveledges. Then I’d have two or three users with read-only priveledges in the backup folder to retrieve files, if it comes to that - these people really do not need write or delete access, because they don’t know what they’re doing.

So that’s around four FTP users with the same home directory, three with read-only and one with write permissions.

The proprietary Dreamhost Control Panel doesn’t make nearly as much sense to me as cPanel does, and the wiki seems to indicate that the sort of setup I had envisioned is impossible.

Any ideas of the best way to go about implementing a similar strategy working within the confines of the Dreamhost framework?

Create your FTP users via Panel’s Manage Users section (make sure to give them shell access):
WRITEUSER will have a home directory with full read/write privileges.
READUSER(1-4) by default are part of the same group as WRITEUSER.

Use PuTTY (or something like SSH or telnet) to connect as each of your users to set this up. Make a link to a WRITEUSER directory from each of the READUSERS:
ln -s /home/WRITEUSER/directory /home/READUSER/directory

They don’t need to use SSH. You just need to SSH in as them to set up the symlinks so they can share the target directory. You can even disable SSH again when you’re finished, although if you leave it enabled you can have them use SFTP instead of FTP, which is far more secure. Any modern FTP client should support it.